Archive for narrative
Testing, testing. . .
Diagram of Wishing Well Project
Diagram of Branching Narratives Project
George and I thought of the Seeds of these two ideas on a walk home last week, we had spent all evening in the studio wracking our brains as to what sort of project we wanted to make. Although we both produced ‘After We Come and Go’ our individual interests had not yet, in our mutual agreement, combined fully to create a piece that is representative of our collaborative creative practice. Take this picture for example;
first prototype
What we have here is a screen shot of an application that George made in Flash this week to test linking and branching from text inputs (click the image to enlarge). Firstly, creating an app like this would have been inconceivable this time last year, in addition, we would not have been as aware of the importance of prototyping (or indeed our proposed idea). The project proposals and application that we have written this week show a development in our practice, away from that preliminary period of learning to a stage where we can apply what we gained from ‘After We Come And Go’ technically and focus on communication, functionality and usability.
Addventures
I have spent most of the day looking at collaborative story creation and stumbled across Addventures (thanks Wikipedia). An Addventure is a search based drama and an interactive fiction and often the narrative is communicated through a text only command line interface, I lost a lot of my time this afternoon immersed in Anchorhead, a horror game created by by Michael S. Gentry (1998), where by the protagonist, the wife of a university professor is exploring her new town (there is more to it but I found it confusing at first and by the time I had worked it out I felt like I should do some work…I have sworn to revisit it tonight!)
As a fan of the matrix, I was instantly drawn to its green and black command line interface and once I had got to grips with the imperative sentences (‘walk south’ or ‘open window’) it was easily navigated. As mentioned earlier I had to play with it a lot before I fully mastered what I had to do and as a child of the digital revolution, the absence of images to illustrate my surroundings confused me at first as I skipped through the instructions (tut tut). However once I had realised the importance of the descriptive passages I was able to navigate myself around the mentally envisaged town of Anchorhead.
When using this game, I was reminded of Geoff Ryman’s hypertext novel ‘253‘, beacuse I felt that although my path through the game would be determinded by my own decisions I was inevitably being pointed in the direction of an ending, an ending which would become more apparent as I progressed through the game.
Possible applications of this style of game and user experience, could be the creation of a front end management system for a story like this, which would enable users to be authors and to have a say in the progression of the narrative. However, this idea made me question the validility of open ended immersive complexity in the formation of narative – you cannot rely on users inputting text that will make sence (as we found with After We Come and Go) and I am reticent to apply censorship to projects I create. A way of approaching this would be to allow users the right to be an administrator of sorts and perhaps have a voting system in place to allow the deletion of input.
Games such as Anchorhead can be coded in C and other such languages, there are object orientated programmes such as TADS, a freeware programming system that allows you to programme games like these.
